A novel scheme employing low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in atmospheric optical communication system is proposed. We deploy coherent detection at the receiving side in the proposed scheme. To reduce bit error rate (BER) and enhance the system performance, LDPC codes are exploited and coherent receiver is used to improve the receiving sensitivity. Experiments are implemented to evaluate the performance of the transmission system. The atmospheric channel attenuations are set to 20-30 dB/km. The coherent detection with LDPC codes can reduce the received power requirement by ~4 dBm at the BER of 10^-9.