  An induced subgraph is called an induced matching if each vertex is a
degree-1 vertex in the subgraph. The \textsc{Almost Induced Matching} problem
asks whether we can delete at most $k$ vertices from the input graph such that
the remaining graph is an induced matching. This paper studies parameterized
algorithms for this problem by taking the size $k$ of the deletion set as the
parameter. First, we prove a $6k$-vertex kernel for this problem, improving the
previous result of $7k$. Second, we give an $O^*(1.6765^k)$-time and
polynomial-space algorithm, improving the previous running-time bound of
$O^*(1.7485^k)$.
