An efficient method and apparatus for identifying one or more targets in an image is presented. A matching operation is performed that compares the image against multiple templates jointly. The multiple templates are sorted into multiple clusters. The joint template matching operation achieves an improvement in performance by focusing on a subset of the clusters. For each grid location, clusters whose reference templates have low matching scores with the image content of the grid location are bypassed or excluded from the matching operation. This saving in computation load is made possible by the clustering of the templates, which can be performed offline and does not affect the performance of the joint template matching operation.