Cleaning surfaces with laser radiation is of great importance for many applications. In many cases, damage to the underlying surface must be avoided, such as melting of metallic materials. Inline monitoring and subsequent closed-loop control of cleaning processes is of great importance for this reason. In this paper, the closed-loop control of laser cleaning processes of metallic surfaces in the range of short pulses (pulse duration ≥ 1∙10^-3 s) based on spectral process emissions was carried out to ensure a reliable removal of varying contaminations. The approach is based on the fact that the spectral process emissions are depending on the interaction between laser beam, contamination and work piece. Based on a time-dependent consideration of spectral process emissions in the range from 300 to 1000nm, a closed-loop control was developed based on selected spectral emission lines. A minimum control time of 10µs was realized by using an IPG YLM-450/4500-QCW fiber laser. The developed system was successfully transferred from single pulses to surface cleaning. Further experiments were performed to determine the location and time of laser beam absorption by vaporized contaminants. It can be shown by scanning electron microscopy that the removal of contaminants depends on the pulse duration, i.e. partial melting of grains on the surface can be detected at an early stage and before the contamination has been completely removed (steel DC04/1.0338).