Traditional data driven fault detection methods assume that the process operates in a single mode so that they cannot perform well in processes with multiple operating modes. To monitor multimode processes effectively, this paper proposes a novel process monitoring scheme based on orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF) and hidden Markov model (HMM). The new clustering technique ONMF is employed to separate data from different process modes. The multiple HMMs for various operating modes lead to higher modeling accuracy. The proposed approach does not presume the distribution of data in each mode because the process uncertainty and dynamics can be well interpreted through the hidden Markov estimation. The HMM-based monitoring indication named negative log likelihood probability is utilized for fault detection. In order to assess the proposed monitoring strategy, a numerical example and the Tennessee Eastman process are used. The results demonstrate that this method provides efficient fault detection performance. (C) 2016 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.