A Heart Beat System (HBS) enables both inertial navigation system (INS) technology and other sensors, e.g., laser radar (LIDAR) systems, cameras and the like to be precisely time-coupled. The result of this coupling enables microsecond control by the HBS to each sensor slave component. This synchronization enables the precise time of each sensor measurement to be known which in turn allows highly accurate world coordinates to be computed from each set of received date, e.g., laser pulses range data. Such precision results in 3-dimensional point cloud data with relative accuracies in the 5-10 cm range and absolute positioning accuracies in the sub 40 cm range. This precision further enables multiple sensors to be used simultaneously with outstanding registration which leads to fused 3D point cloud databases representing a more comprehensive urban scene. Finally, 3D data collected from subsequent missions can be used for precision change detection analysis.