With the increasing of bacterial resistance to available antibiotics and water contamination by poisonous organic dyes, it's necessary to consider how to overcome these concerns. In this paper, novel visible-lightsensitive InVO4/AgVO3 photocatalysts with a p-n junction were synthesized through an ion exchange and in-situ growth process. The obtained photocatalysts were characterized by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV-DRS) respectively. It can be observed that the AgVO3 exhibits a rod-shaped structure, while a plentiful of spherical shaped InVO4 particles are formed on the surface. The rod-shaped structure of AgVO3 wasn't changed by the addition of InVO4, but its photocatalytic properties were tremendously improved. The best photocatalyst was 0.5InVO(4)/AgVO3, over which the Rhodamine B (RhB) solution was almost decomposed in 200 min under visible light irradiation. Moreover, about 99.9999% of P. aeruginosaudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa), Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) were killed over 0.5InVO(4)/AgVO3 at 30 min. From these results it can be inferred that 0.5InVO(4)/AgVO3 heterojunctional photocatalyst has an improved efficiency for the separation of the current carriers to enhance the photocatalytic performances. This result provided a valuable design for the novel InVO4/AgVO3 heterojunction photocatalysts with excellent photocatalytic properties used in marine antifouling. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.