Jokes aside, isn't it wrong that OCR software still always produces textual result from images wich are not text? More than a decade ago I OCRed an old book, and I remember how annoying it was to deal with all the garbage text produced from small pictures, smudges, and dirt. It looks like there's not much progress done since in the field
Not really. Proper OCR in the broadest sense (extracting text from arbitrary pdfs that intermingle tables, images, etc, or from hand written artistic posters) requires a full understanding of semantic intent.
You are perhaps imagining more constrained scenarios of straight lines of consistent text on a page with well-known artifacts of "noise" (smudges, print imperfections, and so on).
