Smart multichannel mode extraction for enhanced bearing fault diagnosis

•SMTS with a solid mathematical theory is built to elegantly detect CFs of the latent modes.•MSD induced by CFs can decompose the multichannel signals by a single-step calculation.•Feature enhancement strategy is designed to locate and fuse multichannel sensitive modes.•SMME method is proposed via combining SMTS, MSD and feature enhancement strategy.•One simulated and two experimental cases are conducted to validate the proposed method.