This paper deals with the analysis of leakage current characteristics of silicone rubber insulator in order to develop a new condition monitoring tool to identify the flashover of outdoor insulators. In this work, laboratory based pollution performance tests are carried out on silicone rubber insulator under ac voltage at different pollution levels and relative humidity conditions with sodium chloride (NaCl) as a contaminant. Min-Norm spectral analysis is adopted to calculate the higher order harmonics and Signal Noise Ratio (SNR). Choi-Williams Distribution (CWD) function is employed to understand the time frequency characteristics of the leakage current signal. Reported results on silicone rubber insulators show that the flashover development process of outdoor polymer insulators could be identified from the higher order harmonics and signal noise ratio values of leakage current signals.