Abstract Pupil center localization is an essential requirement for robust eye gaze tracking systems. In this paper, a low-cost pupil center localization algorithm is presented. The aim is to propose a computationally inexpensive algorithm with high accuracy in terms of performance and processing speed. Hence, a computationally inexpensive pupil center localization algorithm based on maximized integral voting of candidate kernels is presented. As the kernel type, a novel circular hollow kernel (CHK) is used. Estimation of pupil center is employed by applying a rule-based schema for each pixel over the eye sockets. Additionally, several features of CHK are proposed for maximizing the probability of voting for each kernel. Experimental results show promising results with 96.94% overall accuracy with around 13.89 ms computational time (71.99 fps) for a single image as an average time by using a standard PC. An extensive benchmarking study indicates that this method outperforms the learning-free algorithms and it competes with the other methods having a learning phase while their processing speed is much higher. Furthermore, this proposed learning-free system is fast enough to run on an average PC and also applicable to work with even a low-resolution webcam on a real-time video stream.