The aim of this paper is to extend the incidence rate of an SEIR epidemic model with relapse and varying total population size to a general nonlinear form, which does not only include a wide range of monotonic and concave incidence rates but also takes on some neither monotonic nor concave cases, which may be used to reflect media education or psychological effect. By application of the novel geometric approach based on the third additive compound matrix, we focus on establishing the global stability of the SEIR model. Our analytical results reveal that the model proposed can retain its thresh...