A paraboloidal catadioptric camera is calibrated by relaxing the assumption of an ideal system to account for perspective projection, radial distortion, and mirror misalignment occurring within the camera system. Calibration points, which are small and visually distinct objects, are distributed at fixed locations within an environment. Omnidirectional images are captured by the catadioptric camera at different locations of the environment. Data points are obtained by identifying the location of the calibration points in each captured image. An optimization algorithm best-fits the data points to a perspective camera model in order to derive parameters, which are used to calibrate the catadioptric camera.