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
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...