By studying the traditional spectral reflectance reconstruction method, spectral reflectance and the relative spectral power distribution of a lighting source are sparsely decomposed, and the orthogonal property of the principal component orthogonal basis is used to eliminate basis; then spectral reflectance data are obtained by solving a sparse coefficient. After theoretical analysis, the spectral reflectance reconstruction based on sparse prior knowledge of the principal component orthogonal basis by a single-pixel detector is carried out by software simulation and experiment. It can reduce the complexity and cost of the system, and has certain significance for the improvement of multispectral image acquisition technology.and the Innovation Project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 14YZ099), National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (Grant No. 2015CB352004).