Patent ID: 7528950

Claim:
A process monitoring system comprising: one or more tunable light sources; a light delivery medium for delivering light of a specific tuned wavelength from said tunable light sources to one or more terminals; one or more reference detectors for detecting the intensity ratio of said tuned light at said tunable light source and one or more points along said light delivery medium and at one or more of said terminals; one or more detectors, for detecting light reflected from or emitted by one or more samples located in close proximity to said one or more terminals, and a controller for tuning said tunable light sources in a pre-determined pattern; and a data collection device for collecting and storing information from said detectors, wherein said controller and said data collection device normalize said stored information with respect to any combination of reference value readings from said one or more reference detectors, and provide light source intensity normalization such that each plane or wavelength of data within a spectral hypercube is normalized to the reference value.