A lossy compression metho is one where compressing data and then decompressing it retrieves data that may well be different from the original, but is close enough to be useful in some way. Lossy compression is most commonly used to compress multimedia data (audio, video, still images), especially in applications such as streaming media and internet telephony. On the other hand lossless compression is required for text and data files, such as bank records, text articles, etc.