Abstract: This paper introduces a thermal fault diagnosis method called multi-scale guided filtering and decision fusion. The proposed method combines multiscale guided filtering and decision-fusion techniques for fault diagnosis. It comprises three main steps. First, the Mahalanobis distance between the fault area and background is estimated, and initial thermal fault diagnosis results are generated. The initial diagnosis result is then filtered using guided filtering with various parameters, and several filtering feature maps are generated. Different filtering feature maps contain complementary spatial-structure information. Finally, a principal component analysis algorithm fuses these filtering feature maps to capture their spatial structure information and thermal information in filtering feature maps. Experimental results show that the proposed diagnosis method has a better detection performance than the current state-of-the-art detectors.