# Pupil: An Open Source Platform for Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Gaze-based Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0006 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0006/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [EgoExoLearn: A Dataset for Bridging Asynchronous Ego- and Exo-centric View of Procedural Activities in Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16182/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Egocentric Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00789/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Fusion of EMG and Vision for Human Grasp Intent Inference in Prosthetic Hand Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03893/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Review of Gaze Estimation and its Interactive Applications on Handheld Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00122/) (2023)
- [Eye-tracked Virtual Reality: A Comprehensive Survey on Methods and Privacy Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14080/) (2023)
- [Where Do Deep Fakes Look? Synthetic Face Detection via Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01165/) (2021)
- [EllSeg-Gen, towards Domain Generalization for head-mounted eyetracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01947/) (2022)
- [FreeGaze: Resource-efficient Gaze Estimation via Frequency Domain Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06692/) (2022)
- [Gaze-enhanced Crossmodal Embeddings for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00129/) (2022)
- [Involution Fused ConvNet for Classifying Eye-Tracking Patterns of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03575/) (2024)
- [Modeling State Shifting via Local-Global Distillation for Event-Frame Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00548/) (2024)
- [PrivateGaze: Preserving User Privacy in Black-box Mobile Gaze Tracking Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00950/) (2024)
- [Head and eye egocentric gesture recognition for human-robot interaction using eyewear cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11500/) (2022)
- [What's on your mind? A Mental and Perceptual Load Estimation Framework towards Adaptive In-vehicle Interaction while Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05564/) (2022)
- [One step closer to EEG based eye tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06039/) (2023)
- [DiffGaze: A Diffusion Model for Continuous Gaze Sequence Generation on 360deg Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17477/) (2024)
- [Swap It Like Its Hot: Segmentation-based spoof attacks on eye-tracking images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13827/) (2024)
- [EyeTrAES: Fine-grained, Low-Latency Eye Tracking via Adaptive Event Slicing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18813/) (2024)
- [Digitally Prototype Your Eye Tracker: Simulating Hardware Performance using 3D Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16742/) (2025)
- [CNeuroMod-THINGS, a densely-sampled fMRI dataset for visual neuroscience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09024/) (2025)
- [Do Smart Glasses Dream of Sentimental Visions? Deep Emotionship Analysis for Eyewear Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09933/) (2022)
- [Gaze-Vergence-Controlled See-Through Vision in Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02645/) (2022)
- [Using Deep Learning to Increase Eye-Tracking Robustness, Accuracy, and Precision in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19768/) (2024)
- [High-frequency near-eye ground truth for event-based eye tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03057/) (2025)
- [GuideAI: A Real-time Personalized Learning Solution with Adaptive Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20402/) (2026)
- [MemX: An Attention-Aware Smart Eyewear System for Personalized Moment Auto-capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00916/) (2021)
- [Slippage-robust Gaze Tracking for Near-eye Display](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11637/) (2022)
- [An Embedded and Real-Time Pupil Detection Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14098/) (2023)
- [A temporally quantized distribution of pupil diameters as a new feature for cognitive load classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12757/) (2023)
- [Human Comfortability Index Estimation in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14644/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Commercial head-mounted eye trackers provide useful features to customers in industry and research but are expensive and rely on closed source hardware and software. This limits the application areas and use of mobile eye tracking to expert users and inhibits user-driven development, customisation, and extension. In this paper we present Pupil -- an accessible, affordable, and extensible open source platform for mobile eye tracking and gaze-based interaction. Pupil comprises 1) a light-weight headset with high-resolution cameras, 2) an open source software framework for mobile eye tracking, as well as 3) a graphical user interface (GUI) to playback and visualize video and gaze data. Pupil features high-resolution scene and eye cameras for monocular and binocular gaze estimation. The software and GUI are platform-independent and include state-of-the-art algorithms for real-time pupil detection and tracking, calibration, and accurate gaze estimation. Results of a performance evaluation show that Pupil can provide an average gaze estimation accuracy of 0.6 degree of visual angle (0.08 degree precision) with a latency of the processing pipeline of only 0.045 seconds.