The positioning accuracy and speed stability of the brushless DC motor (BLDC motor), as the drive element of the optomechanically scanned system (OMSS), are closely interrelated to the final imaging quality of the system. Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with strong anti-interference ability, fast response and good robustness is one of the extensively used control strategies. However, the performance of ADRC working in a complicated environment will be limited due to the controller structure, parameter tuning and the influence of multi-source nonlinear disturbance. Therefore, an improved ADRC method is proposed, which can switch between ‘point-to-point control mode’ and ‘stable speed control mode’ according to the system requirements. To further suppress the torque ripple and improve the control performance of the system, an improved harmonic injection scheme is added, and the parameters of improved ADRC are tuned by a slime mould algorithm based on a Levy flight operator (LF-SMA). The stability of the proposed ADRC is proved by Lyapunov stability theory. The experimental results show that the proposed control scheme could be available to reduce the torque ripple of the system.