Template matching has many applications in signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and video compression. This paper proposes a fast coarse-to-fine template matching algorithm for finding the exact best match, i.e., the match that may be found by a full search. This is obtained by pruning the number of candidates in the full search using the results of a coarse search. Experimental results show that speed ups of a couple of orders of magnitude can easily be achieved using this method for typical low-noise cases of two-dimensional (2-D) template matching.