Many traditional methods for shape classification involve
establishing point correspondences between shapes to
produce matching scores, which are in turn used as similarity
measures for classification. Learning techniques have
been applied only in the second stage of this process, after
the matching scores have been obtained. In this paper,
instead of simply taking for granted the scores obtained
by matching and then learning a classifier, we learn the
matching scores themselves so as to produce shape similarity
scores that minimize the classification loss. The solution
is based on a max-margin formulation in the structured
prediction setting. Experiments in shape databases reveal
that such an integrated learning algorithm substantially improves
on existing methods.