Accurate state of charge (SOC) estimation is a fundamental guarantee for effective development of lithium-ion power battery in electric vehicles. To improve the SOC estimation precision and robustness, a novel model-based estimation approach has been proposed. Fully giving consideration to the effect of measurement errors, the dynamic external electrical property of lithium-ion battery is approximated by a controlled auto-regressive and moving average (controlled ARMA)-based equivalent circuit model. An improved adaptive extended Kalman filter approach is developed for SOC estimation based on the multiinnovation principle. Meanwhile, the different weighting factor is added into each innovation to reduce cumulative influence of historical interference. Since the flat characteristic in OCV-SOC fitting curve enlarges the OCV-based SOC estimation error, a feedforward compensation method is introduced to reduce OCV identification error to improve OCV-based SOC estimation. The simulation and experimental results verify the validity of the proposed methodology over other estimation methods. Besides, simulated current noise is added to the condition data to prove the high precision and strong robustness of the proposed algorithm. INDEX TERMS Lithium-ion battery, state of charge, Kalman filter, multi-innovation, OCV compensation.