In the intensity modulation and direct detection （IM/DD） multiple-input multiple-output （MIMO） optical wireless communication systems, a direct-current-biased adaptive modulation scheme is proposed to guarantee the nonnegative property of transmitted signals, and the MIMO channel is converted to a parallel channel by using a singular value decomposition. Besides, a QR decomposition and successive interference cancellation based adaptive modulation scheme is proposed, and the MIMO channel can be simplified to a parallel channel under the bit error ratio （BER） target constraint. The power is optimally allocated to each sub-channel to maximize the data rate. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive modulation schemes can effectively improve the transmission rate of the systems under the BER target and constant optical power constraints. The proposed adaptive modulation schemes make use of the multiplexing gain of the MIMO techniques, and can further improve the spectrum efficiency of optical wireless systems.
