Difference between Lossy Compression and Lossless Compression
Data Compression refers to a technique where a large file to reduced to smaller sized file and can be decompressed again to the large file. Lossy compression restores the large file to its original form with loss of some data which can be considered as not-noticable while lossless compression restores the large file to its original form without any loss of data.
Following are some of the important differences between Lossy Compression and Lossless Compression.
| Sr. No. | Key | Lossy Compression | Lossless Compression |
|---|
| 1 | Data Elimination | Lossy compression eliminates those bytes which are considered as not-noticable. | Lossless compression keeps even those bytes which are not-noticable. |
| 2 | Restoration | After lossy compression, a file cannot be restored to its original form. | After lossless compression, a file can be restored to its original form. |
| 3 | Quality | Lossy compression leads to compromise with quality. | No quality degradation happens in lossless compression. |
| 4 | Size | Lossy compression reduces the size of file to large extent. | Lossless compression reduces the size but less as compared to lossy compression. |
| 5 | Algorithm used | Transform coding, Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete Wavelet transform, fractal compression etc. | Run length encoding, Lempel-Ziv-Welch, Huffman Coding, Arithmetic encoding etc. |
| 6 | Uses | Lossy compression is used to compress audio, video and images. | Lossless compression is used to compress text, images and sound. |
| 7 | Capacity | Lossy compression technique has high data holding capacity. | Lossless compression has low data holding capacity as compared to lossy compression. |
Published on 06-Jan-2020 11:14:27
