When implementing a selection algorithm in a processing sketch I cycle through *each* object in the scene and check to see if it is within a few pixel range of where the mouse clicked. There are lots of objects and they are very small. 

As you can imagine once the scene gets filled with objects this becomes really burdensome. Are there easy ways to speed up this search? Can I easily I make this search binary? The objects in my scene are points so polygon hit-testing algorithms don't seem like the right solution.