In recent years, with the continuous promotion of the " Ocean Power" strategy, Underwater Wireless Optical Communication (UWOC) has played an important role in marine military, underwater environment monitoring, submarine oil exploration and marine science research due to its advantages in large bandwidth, fast rate, low power consumption and high security. UWOC has become a new feasible underwater communication technology. The positioning technology is now regarded as the basis of UWOC applications and one of the key techniques in underwater target detection & moving object tracking, which has been favored by researchers. In this paper, the development of UWOC and related research results are introduced in detail, with diverse UWOC localization methods being analyzed. Besides, the research status, the challenges and the development prospects for UWOC localization technology are also discussed.