It depends.. If your objects are simple shapes (circles, rectangles), you can do this with math.
If you need to roughly detect several stages of overlapping (touching, some overlapping, overlapping a lot), you can scale down the original sprite to 0.9, 0.5, 0.2 etc., every time checking if it's still overlapping another sprite. And after that return it to 100% size. Overlapping checks are quite fast, so you can do all this in one tick.
Also you may find some useful ideas in this post: