Lossy compression
In information technology, "lossy" compression is the class of data encoding methods that uses inexact approximations (or partial data discarding) for representing the content that has been encoded. Such compression techniques are used to reduce the amount of data that would otherwise be needed to store, handle, and/or transmit the represented content. The different versions of the photo of the cat at the right demonstrate how the approximation of an image becomes progressively coarser as more details of the data that made up the original image are removed. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression can often be much more substantial than what is possible with lossless data compression techniques.
