Comment by fitzwatermellow

Thanks for the reply!

So what I'm really after is a way to iteratively "perturb" the sample in such a way that the resulting texture will smoothly reflect those changes.

Take a look at this rough illustration:

Op-Art Texture Synthesis

http://imgur.com/a/1IKN3

You mentioned rotation and mirroring type bitmap ops in your algorithm. But how do we precisely apply a series of dynamic filters to the input to "evolve" the patch? Even using overlapping kernels it seems quite intensive! And prone to artefacts...