The aim for this study was to establish a useful tool to detect and to identify trace compounds of pharmaceutical drug tablets by using Raman microscopy and advanced multivariate data analysis method, namely band-target entropy minimization (BTEM). Model pharmaceutical tablets comprising four components with varying proportions were prepared with custom press tooling after blending. One of the components, magnesium stearate, was added as a trace component, with weight percentage in the model tablets as 1%, 0.5%, and 0.2%. Raman point-by-point mapping was performed on the area of 200 µm Χ 200 µm using near infrared laser source and 50Χ objective lens with a step size of 5 µm in both the x and y directions. Advanced multivariate analysis, BTEM, was then performed on the Raman image data to recover all observable pure component spectra. BTEM has been successfully applied to recover pure component spectra of magnesium stearate, the trace component in the model pharmaceutical tablets. In addition, the spatial distribution of magnesium stearate on the area being mapped was also generated. The success of BTEM to identify pure component spectrum of trace compound in pharmaceutical tablets offers a new analytical approach to possibly identify minor degradation products in pharmaceutical tablets in drug stability study.