This study describes the underwater OOK channel model and analyses the correspondence between BER and SNR of underwater OOK modulation methods in different water quality conditions. To cope with the impact of an underwater channel on the optical signal transmission, an underwater optical communication transmitter-transceiver based on hardware circuits and field-programmable logic gate devices is designed. The digital signal processing modules such as FIR filtering (to improve the SNR of the system), adaptive judgement threshold and sliding mean filtering are designed to improve the communication BER performance. The communication performance of the underwater communication transmitter and transceiver is verified under different water quality conditions. The experimental results show that the terminal can achieve a sensitivity of -38 dm at a transmission rate of 5 Mbps and BER of 10^-6. The transmission distance can reach 20, 10 and 4.5 m in class I, class II and class III waters, respectively. In the class III water test, the communication distance of 5 m and BER of 10^-5 can meet the demand of voice transmission. The distortion-free image and SD video transmission function can be realised at the communication distance of 4.5 m and BER of 10^-6, verifying the feasibility of underwater optical communication based on digital signal processing.