Abstract. This paper presents a method for combining classifiers that uses knearest localized templates. The localized templates are estimated from a training set using C-means clustering algorithm, and matched to the decision profile of a new incoming sample by a similarity measure. The sample is assigned to the class which is most frequently represented among the k most similar templates. The appropriate value of k is determined according to the characteristics of the given data set. Experimental results on real and artificial data sets show that the proposed method performs better than the conventional fusion methods