The condition assessment of engineering systems has increased in importance because the manpower needed to operate and supervise various plants has been reduced. Especially, induction motors are at the core of most engineering processes, and there is an indispensable need to monitor their health and performance. So detection and diagnosis of motor faults is a base to improve efficiency of the industrial plant. In this paper, a model-based fault detection system is developed for induction motors, using steady state vibration signals. Early various fault detection systems using vibration signals are a trivial method and those methods are prone to have missed fault or false alarms. The suggested motor fault detection system was developed using a model-based reference value. The stationary signal had been extracted from the non-stationary signal using a data segmentation method. The signal processing method applied in this research is FFT. A reference model with spectra signal is developed and then the residuals of the vibration signal are generated. The ratio of RMS values of vibration residuals is proposed as a fault indicator for detecting faults. The developed fault detection system is tested on 800 hp motor and it is shown to be effective for detecting faults in the air-gap eccentricities and broken rotor bars. The suggested system is shown to be effective for reducing missed faults and false alarms. Moreover, the suggested system has advantages in the automation of fault detection algorithms in a random signal system, and the reference model is not complicated.