Visual recognition of cardiac images is important for cardiac pathology diagnosis and treatment. Due to the limited availability of annotated datasets, traditional methods usually extract features directly from two-dimensional slices of three-dimensional (3D) heart images, followed by pathological classification. This process may not ensure the overall anatomical consistency in 3D heart. A new method for classification of cardiac pathology is therefore proposed based on 3D parametric model reconstruction. First, 3D heart models are reconstructed based on multiple 3D volumes of cardiac imaging data at the end-systole (ES) and end-diastole (ED) phases. Next, based on these reconstructed 3D hearts, 3D parametric models are constructed through the statistical shape model (SSM), and then the heart data are augmented via the variation in shape parameters of one 3D parametric model with visual knowledge constraints. Finally, shape and motion features of 3D heart models across two phases are extracted to classify cardiac pathology. Comprehensive experiments on the automated cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC) dataset of the Statistical Atlases and Computational Modelling of the Heart (STACOM) workshop confirm the superior performance and efficiency of this proposed approach.