Embodiments described herein include a display device having a capacitive sensing device, a processing system and a method for detecting presence of an input object using a capacitive sensing device. In one embodiment, the display device includes a plurality of sensor electrodes arranged in a matrix. The processing system performs absolute capacitive sensing with the matrix of sensor electrodes. When an area of interest is detected using the absolute capacitive sensing techniques, the processing system performs targeted transcapacitance sensing using a selected subset of the sensor electrodes in the area of interest.