| Symmetric and Asymmetric Compression: asymmetric techniques require substantially more work to either compress or decompress the data. For example, retrieval of stored images would be best served by a compression technique that may be lengthy to compress (once), but is very fast to decompress every time the image is requested. |
| Adaptive Encoding: depends on the properties of the data. |
| Lossy and Lossless compression: In a lossless compression, the data is unchanged after compression and decompression. In a lossy compression, the data will be less precise. |