In a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, a large number of receiving antennas at the base station can simultaneously serve multiple users. Linear detectors can achieve optimal performance but require large dimensional matrix inversion, which requires a large number of arithmetic operations. Several low complexity solutions are reported in the literature. In this work, we have presented an improved two-dimensional double successive projection (I2D-DSP) algorithm for massive MIMO detection. Simulation results show that the proposed detector performs better than the conventional 2D-DSP algorithm at a lower complexity. The performance under channel correlation also improves with the I2D-DSP scheme. We further developed a soft information generation algorithm to reduce the number of magnitude comparisons. The proposed soft symbol generation method uses real domain operation and can reduce almost 90% flops and magnitude comparisons.