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

TL;DR

Pupil is an open source, affordable, and extensible platform for mobile eye tracking that combines high-resolution hardware with real-time software algorithms, enabling broader application and customization in gaze-based interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive open source system with hardware and software for mobile eye tracking, improving accessibility and customization over proprietary solutions.

Findings

Achieves an average gaze estimation accuracy of 0.6 degrees.

Provides real-time processing with 0.045 seconds latency.

Supports monocular and binocular gaze estimation.

Abstract

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.