Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery has always drawn wide attention. In this paper, Intrinsic Component Filtering (ICF), which achieves population sparsity and lifetime consistency using two constraints: l1/2 norm of column features and l3/2 -norm of row features, is proposed for the machinery fault diagnosis. ICF can be used as a feature learning algorithm, and the learned features can be fed into the classification to achieve the automatic fault classification. ICF can also be used as a filter training method to extract and separate weak fault components from the noise signals without any prior experience. Simulated and experimental signals of bearing fault are used to validate the performance of ICF. The results confirm that ICF performs superior in three fault diagnosis fields including intelligent fault diagnosis, weak signature detection and compound fault separation.