According to the mounting style and application requirements of electro-optic payload (EO) on small UAV platform, a technical scheme of forward-ground wide-area scanning based on roll-pitch structure EO was proposed. The mathematical model of scanning state was constructed, the algorithm for optimizing control parameters to maximize scanning width of EO based on platform parameters was proposed, the rationality of the algorithm was analyzed by example data, and the real-time performance of the algorithm was measured. The technical status of forward-ground wide-area scanning was tested by simulation and flight test. The results show that the control parameters obtained by the proposed algorithm are optimal, it takes less than 40 ms to run on the target embedded platform and can optimize online in real-time. The proposed scanning technology can still achieve forward-ground continuous coverage under certain platform disturbances, and the overlapping rate of the field of view (FOV) is variable during scanning. The closer to the scanning edge area, the smaller the overlapping range of adjacent FOV. The scanning range should select the area sandwiched between the scanning control points at both ends of transverse direction to avoid leakage due to small overlapping rate in scanning edge area.