Manifold learning is widely adopted for the fault detection of industrial processes. However, the quality of low-dimensional embedding coordinates can be adversely affected by ill-constructed graph Laplacian. An improved locality preserving projection (ILPP) scheme is proposed. ILPP is built on a geometrically inspired Laplacian, and the Riemannian metric is used to find the suitable bandwidth parameter. The proposed approach combines the advantages of ILPP in preserving manifold data structures and those of support vector data description (SVDD) in handling complex process data distributions. Case studies on helix data, hot strip mill, and Pensim benchmark processes demonstrate the utility and feasibility of the proposed approach. The average fault detection rate for proposed ILPP is 99%, which is higher than locality preserving projection (LPP; 87.8%), local tangent space alignment (LTSA; 74.9%), and principal component analysis (PCA; 90.6%).