Automatic hand gesture determination may be a challenging task considering the complex anatomy and high dimensionality of the human hand. Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and instrumentalities associated with recognizing a hand gesture in spite of the challenges. An apparatus in accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure may use machine learning based techniques to identify the area of an image that may contain a hand and to determine an orientation of the hand relative to a pre-defined direction. The apparatus may then adjust the area of the image containing the hand to align the orientation of the hand with the pre-defined direction and/or to scale the image area to a pre-defined size. Based on the adjusted image area, the apparatus may detect a plurality of hand landmarks and predict a gesture indicated by the hand based on the plurality of detected landmarks.