Fast and Reliable Time Delay Estimation of Strong Lens Systems Using
  Method of Smoothing and Cross-Correlation
  The observable time delays between the multiple images of strong lensing
systems with time variable sources can provide us with some valuable
information to probe the expansion history of the Universe. Estimation of these
time delays can be very challenging due to complexities of the observed data
where there are seasonal gaps, various noises and systematics such as unknown
microlensing effects. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to estimate
the time delays for strong lensing systems implementing various statistical
methods of data analysis including the method of smoothing and
cross-correlation. The method we introduce in this paper has been recently used
in TDC0 and TDC1 Strong Lens Time Delay Challenges and has shown its power in
reliable and precise estimation of time delays dealing with data with different
complexities.
