In this paper the multiscale kernel principal component analysis (MSKPCA) based on sliding median filter (SFM) is proposed for fault detection in nonlinear system with outliers. The MSKPCA based on SFM (SFM-MSKPCA) algorithm is first proposed and applied to process monitoring. The advantages of SFM-MSKPCA are: (1) the dynamical multiscale monitoring method is proposed which combining the Kronecker production, the wavelet decomposition technique, the sliding median filter technique and KPCA. The Kronecker production is first used to build the dynamical model; (2) there are more disturbances and noises in dynamical processes compared to static processes. The sliding median filter technique is used to remove the disturbances and noises; (3) SFM-MSKPCA gives nonlinear dynamic interpretation compared to MSPCA; (4) by decomposing the original data into multiple scales, SFM-MSKPCA analyze the dynamical data at different scales, reconstruct scales contained important information by IDWT, eliminate the effects of the noises in the original data compared to kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). To demonstrate the feasibility of the SFM-MSKPCA method, its process monitoring abilities are tested by simulation examples, and compared with the monitoring abilities of the KPCA and MSPCA method on the quantitative basis. The fault detection results and the comparison show the superiority of SFM-MSKPCA in fault detection. (C) 2011 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.