Downloading and preparing the anime characters dataset

To train a DCGAN network, we need a dataset of anime characters containing cropped faces of the characters. There are multiple ways to collect a dataset. We can either use a publicly available dataset, or we can scrape one, as long as we don't violate the website's scraping policies. In this chapter, we will be scraping images for educational and demonstration purposes only. We have scraped images from pixiv.net using a crawler tool called gallery-dl. This is a command-line tool that can be used to download image collections from websites, such as pixiv.net, exhentai.org, danbooru.donmai.us, and more. It is available at the following link: https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl.

Downloading the dataset

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