This document discusses various methods of data compression. It begins by defining compression as reducing the size of data while retaining its meaning. There are two main types of compression: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression allows for perfect reconstruction of the original data by removing redundant data. Common lossless methods include run-length encoding and Huffman coding. Lossy compression is used for images and video, and results in some loss of information. Popular lossy schemes are JPEG, MPEG, and MP3. The document then proceeds to describe several specific compression algorithms and their encoding and decoding processes.