One approach to the problem of residual generation in a purpose of fault detection is to use an observer. One particular difficulty is to distinguish between faults and disturbances. Various observers have already been inspected in that direction, generally based on exact decoupling w.r.t. unknown disturbances. Here the use of high-gain observer techniques is inspected, with a purpose of attenuation of disturbances rather than exact decoupling: conditions allowing some "robust partial estimation" are first presented, and their possible use in fault detection is then discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.