Implementation of unsupervised induction motor condition monitoring systems has drawn an increasing attention recently among motor drives manufacturers. In the case of soft- starters the possibility of incorporating fault detection features to their conventional functions provides an added value to those elements. Design and development of advanced algorithms that are able to automatically detect and alert about possible failures without requiring continuous human inspection is an especially challenging research goal. In this paper, an algorithm for the automatic detection of rotor damages in induction motors in the case of soft starting is proposed. The twofold approach relies, first, on the application of a time-frequency transform to the starting current signal and, second, on a pattern recognition stage based on the treatment of the time-frequency representation as a symbolic sequence. The innovation of this work is the implementation of the proposed approach for the automatic detection of rotor cage faults in soft-started motors. The experimental results prove the usefulness of the approach for the automatic detection of such faults and its potential for possible future implementation in soft-started machines.