In order to realize the real-time positioning of the catadioptric panoramic camera， a visual odometry method based on the feature point method that can be applied to the catadioptric panoramic camera was proposed. the initialization module for the projection model of the catadioptric panoramic camera was designed for the initialization of the camera pose. In the initialization module， a spherical epipolar geometry suitable for catadioptric panoramic cameras was proposed， and the posture change relationship between two frames of images during the initialization process was calculated through the spherical epipolar geometry. In order to verify the robustness and accuracy of the algorithm， in the same scene， the algorithm in this paper was compared with the visual mileage calculation method using the feature point method of the pinhole camera. The results show that， in the case of using catadioptric panoramic camera， the accuracy of visual odometry in outdoor scenes and indoor scenes improves by 38% and 50%.