This paper presents a generic cognitive vision platform for the automatic recognition of natural complex objects. The recognition consists of three steps : image processing for numerical object description, mapping of numerical data into symbolic data and semantic interpretation for object recognition. The focus of this paper is the distributed platform architecture composed of three highly specialized knowledge based systems (KBS). The first KBS is dedicated to semantic interpretation. The second one has to deal with the anchoring of symbolic data into image data. The last KBS is dedicated to intelligent image processing. After a brief overview of the natural object recognition problem, this paper describes the three subcomponents of the platform.