In a winding system, it is very important to control the tension precisely. Based on the process of rewinding and unwinding, a sensorless tension control method with PI parameters of adaptive speed controllers is proposed in this paper. According to the principle of torque balance, a tension observer is designed to replace the tension sensor, and the observed value instead of the measured value of tension is used as feedback. Then the measurement delay caused by tension sensor is reduced. For the time-variable inertia, Landau discrete-time recursive algorithm is used to estimate the inertias of the rewind and unwind motors. Moreover, the estimated inertias are used to adjust the PI parameters of the speed controllers. As the tension control system has the ability to adapt to the change of inertia, its dynamic performance is improved to some extent. In addition, the proposed sensorless tension control method is simple and easy to implement, which only uses the current and speed signals of the motors without any additional hardware needed. At last, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by the experimental results.