Automatic landmarks on images of hands
There are two simple approaches. 


Find the hand region with thresholding and then use something like convexity defects. Even though you will have many spurious landmarks at the end, you could easily cluster them out, as your scene is well controlled. There are also couple of youtube videos, if you like to get an idea in advance, [1], [2].
Fit a hand model to the image. There are many works in this field, and it's an active academic area. Some are, [1], [2], [3]. Once the model is fit, you could extract any landmark you desire, since the correspondence to the canonical hand frame is determined.


The pdf you provided also gives a simple method for fitting a hand region.