In this paper, we present a detailed comparison of applying three advanced modulation formats including carrierless amplitude and phase modulation (CAP), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-S OFDM) in underwater visible light communication (UVLC) systems. Cascaded post-equalization schemes are suggested to compensate the system impairments. For the first time, a two-level post-equalizer is presented to mitigate the nonlinear effect and improve the system performance of UVLC. The first post-equalization is based on a novel recursive least square Volterra. These modulation formats are all experimentally demonstrated with corresponding digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms. The experimental results show that single carrier modulations including CAP and DFT-S OFDM can outperform OFDM. Our experiment results show that up to 3 Gb/s over a 1.2 m underwater visible light transmission can be achieved by using DFT-S OFDM 64QAM and CAP-64. The measured bit error rate is well under the hard decision-forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8×10 3.