In order to solve the issues of inadequate feature description and inefficient feature learning model existing in current classification methods, this article proposes a multi-channel joint sparse learning model for three-dimensional (3D) non-rigid object classification. First, the authors adopt a multi-level measurement of intrinsic properties to create complementary shape descriptors. Second, they build independent and informative bag of features (BoF) by embedding these shape descriptors into the visual vocabulary space. Third, a max-dependency and min-redundancy criterion is applied for optimal feature filtering on each BoF dictionary based on mutual information; meanwhile, each dictionary is learned and weighted according to its contribution to the classification task, and then a compact multi-channel joint sparse learning model is constructed. Finally, the authors train the joint sparse learning model followed by a Softmax classifier to implement efficient shape classification. The experimental results show that the proposed method has stronger feature representation ability and promotes greatly the discrimination of sparse coding coefficients. Thus, the promising classification performance and the powerful robustness can be obtained compared to the state-of-the-art methods.