The state of health (SOH) of a lithium ion battery is critical to the safe operation of such batteries in electric vehicles (EVs). However, the regeneration phenomenon of battery capacity has a significant impact on the accuracy of SOH estimation. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper we propose a method for estimating battery SOH based on incremental energy analysis (IEA) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). First, the IE curve that effectively describes the complex chemical characteristics of the battery is obtained according to the energy data calculated from the constant current (CC) charging phase. Then, the relationship between the IE curve and battery SOH degradation characteristics is analyzed and the peak height of the IE curve is extracted as the aging characteristic of the battery. Further, Pearson correlation analysis is utilized to determine the linear correlation between the proposed aging characteristics and the battery SOH. Finally, BiLSTM is employed to capture the underlying mapping relationship between peak characteristics and SOH, and a battery SOH estimation model is developed. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to estimate battery SOH under two different charging conditions with a root mean square error less than 0.5% and coefficient of determination above 98%. Additionally, the method is combined with Pearson correlation analysis to select an aging characteristic with high correlation, reducing the required data input and computational burden.