The document discusses lossy compression techniques. It begins by explaining that lossy compression algorithms compress data by discarding some information, yielding much higher compression ratios than lossless compression but resulting in distorted approximations of the original data. It then covers various lossy compression methods including quantization, transform coding using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), wavelet-based coding using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and techniques like vector quantization (VQ) and the Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) that aim to decorrelate signal components before quantization. Key aspects like rate-distortion theory, various distortion measures, and algorithms for quantization are also described.