In this paper,by means of the independent component analysis (ICA) wi th adaptive variable step,a novel channel equalization scheme is proposed in order to perform polari zation effect equalization in coherent optical orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system .In 50Gbit/s CO-OFDM system with 16quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM),the system performance is degrade d seriously by the polarization effect.At the receiver,after performing blind common phase error (CPE) compensation,the ICA with adaptive variable step is implemented to reduce the influence from polar ization effect.In the algorithm,the inversion of each subcarrier channel frequency response is estimated by u sing adaptive iterative step,which depends on the variation of the channel matrix after each iteration.Next,the b lind inter-carrier interference (ICI) phase noise compensation is carried out at the receiver.It is proved by the simulation results that the ada ptive ICA method shares the same performance with only blind phase noise algorithm at DGD =0(differential group delay).And it is also demonstrated that the adaptive ICA algorithm can be used to reduce the s ystem performance degradation from the polarization effect.Compared with the ICA with constant iterative step,its convergence rate is also improved considerably,and the adaptive method reduces the computational complexity great ly.