Active constellation expansion (ACE) and iterative clipping and filtering (ICF) are simple and effective techniques for reducing the peak-to-average ratio (PAPR) in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems, but effective PAPR suppression requires a lot of iterations. To overcome this shortcoming, a joint algorithm based on improved active constellation expansion (IACE) and ICF (IACE-ICF) is proposed. The simulation results show that at the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of 10^-4, the PAPR of IACE-ICF (G=4, iter=4) algorithm is optimized by 1.507 dB, 1.13 dB and 0.204 dB compared with that of the IACE, ICF (iter=4) and ICF-IACE (G=4, iter=4) algorithms, respectively. Meanwhile, when the bit error rate (BER) is 10^-3, the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) of the proposed scheme is optimized by 2.04 dB, 1.75 dB and 1.4 dB compared with that of clipping, ICF (iter=4) and ICF-IACE (G=4, iter=4) algorithms, respectively. On the other hand, the proposed scheme can reduce the number of complex multiplications by 14.29% and complex additions by 28.57% compared with the ICF (iter=14) scheme.