A new signal processing technique is applied to four-cylinder spark and compression ignition engines for the diagnosis of power faults inside the cylinders. This technique utilizes two-sided directional power spectra(예S) of complex vibration signals measured from engine blocks as the patterns for engine cylinder power faults. The dPSs feature that they give not only the frequency contents but also the directivity of the engine block motion. For the automatic detection/diagnosis of cylinder power faults, pattern recognition method using multi-layer neural networks is employed. Experimental results show that the sucess rate for diagnosis of cylinder power faults using dPSs is higher than that using the conventional one-sided power spectra. The proposed technique is also tested to check the robustness to the sensor position and the engine rotational speed.