Simplifying voxel graphics

Hey /prog/

Decided to start working on a new project and I'm kind of stumped. Hoped someone might have some ideas or links to papers or something dealing with this sort of thing.

Writing a program for creating voxel graphics and I want to be able to export optimized meshes from this program. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to group up voxels to eliminate redundant faces, however. Baking the texture and triangulating the results will be simple enough, but that first step of optimizing out all the redundant faces just has me stumped.

I've got an example of what I mean here:
http://i.imgur.com/O3bq4.png

Anyone have any ideas? :)

>>4
That is some pretty cool stuff, but it's a bit far from what I'm trying to accomplish.  I've actually got no problem rendering voxels in a similar way to Minecraft. My issue is optimizing the geometry so that each individual voxel face that is rendered isn't necessarily 1 quad, but part of bigger quads. If you look at the imgur link I provided, what I'm trying to do is take the first image and run the necessary computations to get the second image, which has vastly few quads.