text: Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, or diffuse reflection spectroscopy, is a subset of absorption spectroscopy.  It is sometimes called remission spectroscopy. Remission is the reflection or back-scattering of light by a material, while transmission is the passage of light through a material.  The word remission implies a direction of scatter, independent of the scattering process.  Remission includes both specular and diffusely back-scattered light. The word reflection often implies a particular physical process, such as specular reflection.
  The use of the term remission spectroscopy is relatively recent, and found first use in applications related to medicine and biochemistry.  While the term is becoming more common in certain areas of absorption spectroscopy, the term diffuse reflectance is firmly entrenched, as in diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS) and diffuse-reflectance ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy.