This paper proposes a novel image large rotation and scale estimation method based on the Gabor filter and pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN). First, the Gabor features of the template image and its rotated one are extracted by performing the Gabor filter. Second, we present a modified PCNN model to measure the similarity between the Gabor features of the image and its rotated one. Finally, the rotation angle is calculated by searching the global minimum of the correlation coefficients. Besides rotation estimation, we also propose a scale estimation method based on the max-projection strategy. The Gabor feature image is projected along the estimated rotation angle, and the scale is calculated by searching the peak of this projection result. Moreover, experiments illustrate that the proposed method has high accuracy on rotation and scale estimation and is robust to noise. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach has a more stable performance.