High accuracy underwater inspections are getting more and more important in the underwater industry where time and cost optimization represent nowadays the main innovation drivers. The subsea industry is undergoing a digital transformation process and for this reason, methods that can provide real-time accurate 3D digital measurements are increasingly demanded. This paper provides a short review of the main techniques currently used in subsea metrology to then present an experimental study carried out to evaluate the accuracy potential of three vision-based techniques well-known in photogrammetry, namely visual odometry with and without windowed bundle adjustment, and keyframe based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The accuracy evaluation is done using an ORUS 3D ® subsea photogrammetry system using a certified 3D underwater reference test-field available at COMEX facilities, whose spatial coordinates are known with sub-millimetre accuracy. A critical assessment of results is presented against currently set tolerances for the subsea metrology industry.