Transient-based methods for fault diagnosis of induction machines are attracting a rising interest, due to their reliability and ability to adapt to a wide range of induction machine (IM)'s working conditions. These methods compute the time-frequency (TF) distribution of the stator current, where the patterns of the related fault components can be detected. A significant amount of recent proposals in this field have focused on improving the resolution of the TF distributions, allowing a better discrimination and identification of fault harmonic components. Nevertheless, as the resolution improves, computational requirements (power computing and memory) greatly increases, restricting its implementation in low cost devices for performing on-line fault diagnosis. To address these drawbacks, in this paper the use of the short frequency Fourier transform (SFFT) for fault diagnosis of IMs working under transient regimes is proposed. The SFFT not only keeps the resolution of traditional techniques, such as the short time Fourier transform (STFT), but also achieves a drastic reduction of computation time and memory resources, making this proposal suitable for on-line diagnosis. This method is theoretically introduced and experimentally validated using a laboratory test bench.