Abstract-An efficient generalized semidefinite programming relaxation (SDPR) based virtually antipodal (VA) detection approach is proposed for Gray-coded high-order rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signalling over multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels. Albeit the decomposition of symbol-based detection to a bit-based one is desirable owing to its reduced complexity and increased flexibility, Gray-mapping is nonlinear, and hence the direct bitbased detection of Gray-coded-QAM MIMO systems constitutes a challenging problem. In this paper, we find a way of exploiting the structural regularity of Gray-coded high-order rectangular QAM, and transforms the classic symbol-based MIMO detection model to a low-complexity bit-based detection model. As an appealing benefit, the conventional three-step "signalto-symbols-to-bits" decision process can be substituted by a simpler "signal-to-bits" decision process for the classic Graymapping aided high-order rectangular QAM, and hence any bit-based detection method becomes potentially applicable. As an application example, we propose a direct-bit-based VA-SDPR (DVA-SDPR) MIMO detector, which is capable of directly making binary decisions concerning the individual information bits of the ubiquitous Gray-mapping aided high-order rectangular QAM, while dispensing with symbol-based detection. Furthermore, the proposed model transformation method facilitates the exploitation of the unequal error protection (UEP) property of high-order QAM with the aid of the low-complexity bit-flipping based "hill climbing" method. As a result, the proposed DVA-SDPR detector achieves the best bit error ratio (BER) performance among the known SDPR-based MIMO detectors in the context considered, while still maintaining the lowest-possible worst-case complexity order of O (NT log 2 M + 1) 3.5 .Index Terms-Binary constrained quadratic programming, Gray mapping, primal-dual interior-point algorithm (PD-IPA), Copyright (c) 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.The financial support of the China Scholarship Council (CSC), the EPSRC, UK under the auspices of the China-UK Science Bridges and that of the RC-UK under the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) is gratefully acknowledged. L. Hanzo would also like to acknowledge the fiscal support of the European Research Council's Advanced Fellow Award.This work was presented in part at the 2011 54th IEEE Global Communications Conference, Houston, Texas, USA (GLOBECOM 2011 high-order QAM, semidefinite programming relaxation (SDPR), virtually-antipodal detection.