In this paper, we present an adaptive receiver for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. The adaptive algorithm switches between the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) and the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection according to the channel condition. By exploiting the correlation in both time and frequency domains of OFDM systems, we reduce the complexity of the algorithm further. Simulation in the long term evolution (LTE) system shows that the adaptive detection can achieve high performance with low complexity.