Underwater laser communication is influenced by the absorption and scattering of water, which causes severe signal energy attenuation during propagation. Laser communication based on the photon counting is considered as an effective way to resist signal loss and increase communication distance because of its ultra-high detection sensitivity. However, since communication data recovery is usually realized by detecting electrical pulse at the output of single photon detector directly in traditional photon counting communication, the communication bit error rate would be easily influenced by background light noise. In this paper, an improved method is proposed and studied to solve this problem. In our approach, the photons arrived at the communication receiver are converted into electrical pulses by single photon detector first. Then, communication data is recovered through counting the electrical pulse number on unit time. The experimental result shows that detection sensitivity of 84.24 bit-1 can be realized by the proposed method, when the communication wavelength is 532 nm, the communication rate is 50 kb/s, and the signal to noise ratio is 5.14. The novel approach proposed in this paper provides a new technical idea for high-sensitivity underwater laser communication.