An efficient precoding scheme combing adaptive modulation, space-time block code (STBC) and orthogonal circulant matrix transform (OCT) is proposed to improve the performance of multiple input-multiple output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) based visible light communication (VLC) systems in this work. A 2×2 MIMO-OFDM VLC system is designed and established to evaluate the performance of the proposed adaptive modulation STBC-OCT precoding scheme. The performances of bit error rate (BER), peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) are investigated experimentally for different modulation and coding schemes. The performances of BER are studied in different direct current bias (DC) and driving peak-to-peak voltages (V_PP) offsets. The experimental results show that the system using proposed adaptive modulated STBC-OCT precoding obtains a relatively flat and higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values, lower PAPR compared with other precoding methods. The proposed scheme can obtain the best BER performance, and it is always lower than the 7% pre-forward error correction (pre-FEC) threshold of 3.8×10^-3with the transmission distance is 0.5 m, DC is set to 2.7 V and V_PP is 2.7-2.8 V, it can effectively overcome the bandwidth limitation of MIMO-OFDM VLC system and provide the best reliability.