The state of charge (SOC) is a critical parameter in the battery management system (BMS), and its accurate estimation is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of batteries. This paper presents a lithium-ion battery SOC estimation method that combines an improved neural network with a filtering algorithm. Firstly, the backpropagation (BP) algorithm is chosen as the architecture of the neural network in the hybrid method due to its strong nonlinear approximation ability, and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to optimize it to avoid falling into local optimal solutions. By combining the search ability of PSO with the learning ability of the BP neural network, the accuracy of the neural network model is improved. The proposed method integrates the PSO-BP model with the extended Kalman filter based on minimum error entropy (MEE-EKF). PSO-BP is utilized as the measurement equation for MEE-EKF, while the ampere-hour integration method is employed as the state equation to achieve closed-loop SOC estimation. Finally, experimental validation is conducted under four typical operating conditions and one random condition across a wide temperature range. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy across all conditions compared with the results of other algorithms, with a maximum absolute error of not exceeding 3.13%, a mean absolute error of less than 0.54%, and a root mean square error of no more than 0.66%.