The change and development of leakage current (LC) during the flashover process of insulators are closely related to the discharge process. Characteristic quantities of LC play an important role in the identification and prediction of ice-covered flashover development stages. In this paper, the feature extraction method for LC of ice-covered insulator is discussed based on the shape characteristics of chaotic attractor. Firstly, the power spectrum and the largest Lyapunov exponent are used to analyze the LC of ice-covered insulator qualitatively and quantitatively, which confirmed positive chaotic features during the flashover process. On this basis, the LC is reconstructed in phase space. To solve the problem that the attractor in the high-dimensional space cannot be observed in the phase space reconstruction, the principal vector analysis method is used to project the high-dimensional reconstruction vector into the threedimensional space to reduce the dimension. Finally, the evolution law of chaotic attractor in each stage of LC under different pollution degree is analyzed and discussed. The results show that the LC of ice-covered insulator has obvious characteristics of attractor shape at different stages of pollution, and is sensitive to the degree of pollution and each stage of development. So the shape of the attractor of LC has important application value for the identification of pollution flashover state and prediction of pollution flashover process of ice-covered insulators.INDEX TERMS ice-covered insulator, leakage current, phase space reconstruction, principal vector analysis, chaotic attractor.