It has been a busy time for Headwall Group. The recent acquisition of Austrian-based technology company EVK has been seen by the industry as an innovative move that presents the parent group as uniquely positioned to deepen its impact in the industrial vision market.
“Fundamentally, we are a hyperspectral company, and we’re also, with inno-spec, an optical components company – these two fit together in a bunch of ways,” says Mark Willingham, CEO of Headwall. “EVK is a data company, and that now offers the market something unique.” EVK has an established track record in sensor-based solutions, and its data analysis expertise aligns well with Headwall Group’s existing product set and stated ambition to advance hyperspectral imaging applications and AI-driven interpretation software in machine vision and remote sensing markets.
“Imagine the scenario – historically, the challenge of hyperspectral has typically been that you create a huge amount of data – instead of, say, a page of data, it's more like a cube of data, perhaps 300 pages of it,” explains Willingham. “Users then need to spend time crunching that data, and there’s a lot of it. Interpreting the data and acting on it within less than a second in order to eject, grade or order things is challenging. That’s what's kept hyperspectral technology out of a lot of industrial processes – they just couldn't keep up. So, we have now got a lot of new and different ways in which we can now change that and add value.
The data question
"We're at this inflection point where one can start to crunch data sets really fast and we now have access to AI machine learning software that helps us find the key bits in that data cube, so we're not digesting it all. We're very quickly looking through it, scraping the useful bits and able to crunch away at its edges. I would say we can absolutely keep up with the speed of industrial processing, and that brings to industry the opportunity to learn a bunch of things that they couldn’t previously at any sort of pace.”
On the issue of whether industry always understands these opportunities are out there, Willingham is adamant this remains the fundamental challenge. “I would say hyperspectral imaging is not new – a lot of people do understand that it can do things that they would like to do – but they don't yet fully know that it’s already being used and, in some cases, by some of their competitors,” he says. “We need to go to industry, illustrate that and say here's where we can add the most value.
“As a company, we have identified some areas that are the most attractive – where we know we have created proven value now. And we're certainly pursuing that still, but we are trying not to be everything to everyone. Instead, we have an ambition to be extremely valuable in those areas where we see big opportunities.”
It’s this sort of focus that means Headwall has staked a strong position in a number of significant markets. “Today, we operate at scale in the area of recycled plastics, particularly in Europe,” he told Imaging & Machine Vision Europe. “It's a relatively mature industry and we have some great partners there. We also see opportunity in the area of textile recycling, which I would say is an equally good market, but is still growing. Then, there is new legislation concerning the recycling of black plastics, characterised by, for example, the interior of a car, where there are some special requirements, as black plastic is particularly challenging.
“Another area I would highlight is the food market, where there is an enormous opportunity and we're really all over it. For example, our products are helping to grade and sort berries using BRIX measurement techniques. We work in seafood and potato grading too. In potatoes, people are looking for consistency and for characteristics such as moisture content. In berries, for example, the BRIX measurement would be an incredibly manual process in the past that is costly, financially and in production time.”
This attention on technology solutions – and a careful aversion to becoming too aligned with the integration part of the process – keeps the company’s focus on solution forming and value creation tight. “We're not trying to create the machines that do this work – it’s important we stand alone in a market where we're bringing a solution. Instead of plugging a hyperspectral camera that spits out data that the customer has to interpret, we have to be broader than that. With our latest acquisition [of EVK], we have a software ecosystem that's industry proven and already runs inside of many companies.
Reaching industrial partners
“We'll work through an industry partner – not necessarily the end user – so the focus is getting to those industrial partners to prove our value to them. It’s rare that what we do needs to be an entirely new piece of equipment. The value we create is generally built into an existing process of things they're already doing.
“We work through the machine builders for OEMs. We're the technology experts and we're very explicitly not trying to be automation-first. We get people to do that better than we could and, if we focus our resources where they're really needed, that’s where we really deliver.”
How customers work with Headwall can vary. “I would say there's a spectrum of users – some want to be heavily involved in the understanding of the application; others just want the answers,” says Willingham. “Now that we're really running at scale in multiple industries, it's perhaps much easier perhaps to trust that the technology is there, but not everyone's aware of its existence in the first place.”
The challenge remains that hyperspectral cameras seem much more expensive than RGB cameras. “Of course, they're made in lower volumes; they're larger, they're more complex. and it seems like a real barrier at the moment, so we have to be super-clear about where we think we can offer the greatest value,” says Willingham.
With EVK joining the Headwall Group, which is supported by Arsenal Capital Partners, this case becomes even more compelling. “Now, our AI machine learning software can be baked into our systems. We can develop the model, we have the cameras, and we can plug it into an industrial process and in a proven way,” says Willingham. “I truly believe there's no one out there that has what we now have today, particularly as EVK brings a depth of advanced software built across many years. I think that the biggest thing for people to recognise is that this is achievable, affordable and the new pieces of information we create can make their process better. Value is created by improving the process.”
Improving output in a sustainable way
This focus on value isn’t always focused on the financial – the technology that Headwall is providing is making a big difference across the globe in different ways. “Plastics across the world are a big problem, and so it's very gratifying to be part of that solution,” says Willingham. “Our work in food production – seafood, for example – is helping to improve output in a sustainable way.”
Based in Boston, USA, and with a global business to manage, Willingham, who became CEO in late 2023 admits that after a busy period of acquisition – it bought inno-spec early last year, and Holographix not long before that – the focus is now on delivering on the enlarged group’s potential: “What we can't do and won't do is approach the market the way that, historically, many companies did, which is to make a bunch of cameras, ask customers to pick the right one, and then watch them play around with it until they figure it out. We'll create a solution that says, for example, sweet things go this way and sour things go that way! It's more a consultancy pitch rather than a product pitch.”
