This paper proposes a new strategy to estimate the rotor flux of an induction machine for the direct field oriented control. Electrical model of the induction machine presents the basic idea based on observer structure, which is composed of voltage model and current model. But the former has the defects in low speed range, the latter has the defects of sensitivity to machine parameters. In spite of these shortcomings, the closed loop flux observer based on two models has been prevalent estimation method for the direct field oriented control. In this paper, generalized analysis method named ″observer characteristic function method″is proposed to analyze the kinds of the linear flux observers in unified form. With the observer characteristic function, the estimated rotor flux error involved in the classical methods can be easily clarified. Moreover, the novel rotor flux observer based on this analysis is also presented and the effectiveness of the observer has been verified by the simulation and experimental results.