The state-of-the-art multispectral imaging system can directly acquire the reflectance of a single strand of yarn that is impossible for traditional spectrophotometers. Instead, the spectrophotometric reflectance of a yarn winding, which is constituted by yarns wound on a background card, is regarded as the yarn reflectance in textile. While multispectral imaging systems and spectrophotometers can be separately used to acquire the reflectance of a single strand of yarn and corresponding yarn winding, the quantitative relationship between them is not yet known. In this paper, the relationship is established based on models that describe the spectral response of a spectrophotometer to a yarn winding and that of a multispectral imaging system to a single strand of yarn. The reflectance matching function from a single strand of yarn to corresponding yarn winding is derived to be a second degree polynomial function, which coefficients are the solutions of a constrained nonlinear optimization problem. Experiments on 100 pairs of samples show that the proposed approach can reduce the color difference between yarn windings and single strands of yarns from 2.449 to 1.082 CIEDE2000 units. The coefficients of the optimal reflection matching function imply that the reflectance of a yarn winding measured by a spectrophotometer consists of not only the intrinsic reflectance of yarn but also the nonignorable interreflection component between yarns.