Abstract: Effective perception of underwater environment is the key to the autonomous movements and operations of underwater robots.Firstly, the common problems of underwater visual environment perception are analyzed, and for two of them, i.e.visual degradation and refractive distortion, the influences on underwater visual imaging are summarized.Secondly, the research status of mainstream underwater visual environment perception methods at home and abroad is reviewed from 3 aspects of underwater vision restoration methods, underwater 3D visual perception methods, and underwater vision enhancement methods, to tackle the above-mentioned challenges.Finally, the future development tendencies of underwater visual environment perception are prospected, focusing on the hot research directions such as clustered visual perception, information fusion of multi-modal perception, as well as bionic visual perception.