In this paper, an improved nonlinear process fault detection method is proposed based on modified kernel partial least squares (KPLS). By integrating the statistical local approach (SLA) into the KPLS framework, two new statistics are established to monitor changes in the underlying model. The new modeling strategy can avoid the Gaussian distribution assumption of KPLS. Besides, advantage of the proposed method is that the kernel latent variables can be obtained directly through the eigen value decomposition instead of the iterative calculation, which can improve the computing speed. The new method is applied to fault detection in the simulation benchmark of the Tennessee Eastman process. The simulation results show superiority on detection sensitivity and accuracy in comparison to KPLS monitoring.